Day 5. Fear.

I have been thinking about fear and the nature of that emotion. It has occurred to me that when it comes to human relationships and life in general, fear is not so much us hiding from things but rather hiding things from ourselves. This gives us an illusion of having control over our lives because we make the choices and call the shots. The sad reality however is that we are sometimes ruled by the things we are afraid to face so we pretend they aren’t there or that they are something else.

Unwittingly, I have become a master at that technique during the last 15-20 years of my life. That realisation has sent me into yet another panic attack. How could I have been so blind??? And then anger sets in: why didn’t anybody else see this and help me??? But the answer, of course, is because I have been putting on a façade for most of my life. Dealing with having a learning disability in a society that praised and deified uniformity and conformity required it. So no one then could see what was going on. I have walled myself off from everyone and thus made myself alone. I used to joke that I had developed my ability of being alone in a roomful of people into an art form. Only now I realise how detrimental that was. So even though I had eventually learned to overcome the loner mode, I have not simultaneously developed a way of dealing with the world. So something had to give and I began putting scary things into their own walls so that I wouldn’t have to deal or look at them.

There’s a terrifying aspect to this whole thing: when it comes to relationships, we see what we want to see because often enough we are unable to cope with the idea that the other person might not be that into us. And then, you get to break down and hopefully ask for help.

It had not occurred to me to do this before. A place that is so anonymous if it needs to be where I can scream the most inner things to the universe and still maintain my privacy? A comedian friend of mine, while pulling me out of what was fixing up to be a marathon drinking session in a dive bar, has told me to write what I’m feeling and write it out all the time. There’s no shame in this and no one, except a few people will ever read this. There’s a tremendous freedom in this. Eventually though, I will have to re move a cloak of anonymity either off of this blog and my true inner state. It will be me vanquishing another stage of fear by removing walls from myself and opening up myself to the world.

In the meantime, the minutia of writing this blog and being part of the WordPress community is helping but GODDAMN I am in so much pain every moment of every day! And I still dream of her.